Sunday, August 30, 2015

Narine Abgaryan’s Снебаупалитрияблока(Three
Apples Fell from the Sky)was a perfect summer surprise: Abgaryan’s literary agency sent me the book, which
quickly won me over with gentle humor, sadness and happiness surrounding births and
deaths, and a remote setting in Maran, a village of (mostly!) elderly people in
the Armenian mountains. Three Apples is both magical—with mentions of
dreams and even a bolded reference to
Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—and a bit gritty, thanks to accounts of
day-to-day and historical hardships. Beyond all that, any book where characters
live right over an abyss gets my attention.

Three Apples begins as Sevoyants Anatolia (we
go last name first here) settles in to die a little after noon on a Friday; she’s
bleeding heavily. Though Anatolia is so prepared to die that she’s readied clothes,
she soon agrees to marry Vasily, a widower and blacksmith who brings her a new
scythe, proposes marriage, and quickly moves in. This is all unexpected for
Anatolia, a childless widow and former librarian who shelved books by color and
loves French and Russian literature, with the notable exception of Tolstoy,
whose Anna Karenina thoroughly disgusted her.

Abgaryan tells of the village’s residents through stories of
famine—one little boy foresees deaths and the village later receives supplies, including
a white peacock that ends up living right at that abyss—and of the plagues of flocks
of rats, mice, and flies. The peacock, the dreams, the humor of yeast (much
dissed in Maran after having being received from the outside world) thrown into
the outhouse (never, ever throw yeast away like that!), and the magical happening
that comes toward the end of the book are all wonderful in multiple senses of that
word, both for comic relief and because, well, life is magical… but the
everyday side of life’s magic, something that sounds pretty cheesy when described in
those terms, works simply and beautifully in the book, and appealed to me
even more.

I loved, for example, Anatolia and Vasily’s quiet lunch with
their neighbors, where there’s little talk beyond asking for salt and clinking
of cutlery: “Анатолиявпервыеощутилажизньнекакданность, акакдар.” (“For the first time, Anatolia
sensed/appreciated life not as a given but as a gift.”) And I loved that a young
visitor (an in-law) to the family that lives by the abyss feels “размеренностьбытия” (literally a measuredness of
existence, a slow sort of rhythm or regularity to things) that comes to her from
the nearby forest and the people. Passages like these sum up the book’s charm,
particularly when life is busy for the reader: the measured routine of life in
Maran, where, hmm, there doesn’t seem to be any Internet, and the quiet company
of friends are what hold people together.

On the last page of the novel, there’s a mention of circles of life that resemble ripples from rain drops, where “…every event is a
reflection of what came before…” I ripped that from the middle of very, very
long sentence that ends with three apples waiting to be dropped to earth from the
heavens, as is traditional at the end of Armenian fairytales: “одно тому, кто видел, другоетому, кторассказал, атретьетому, ктослушаливерилвдобро”—“one for the person who saw,
another for the person who told the story, and the third for the person who listened
and believed in what is good.” It’s a fitting end to a book with so much that is good—both universal and specific to Maran—that’s worth believing in.

Disclosures: The usual.
Thank you to Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency for the book! I’ve
heard a lot about Abgaryan’s “Manyuna” books for young adults and was glad to
be introduced to her writing through Apples.

Up Next: Guzel’
Iakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, which
I also enjoyed tremendously. Zuleikha
is the first of the Big Book finalists that I’ll write about; I’ll also write a
summary post about three Big Book finalists I just can’t bring myself to finish
(!). And then another of Abgaryan’s books, People
Who Are Always With Me, which is also very good, and a fifth Big Book
finalist, Boris Ekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e.